Today marks the 400th anniversary of the discovery of Jupiter’s moons, and the start of a whole new chapter in the history of science.
Despite the fact that last year was the International Year of Astronomy in celebration of the 400th anniversary of the first astronomical use of the telescope, it was actually in early 1610 that Galileo made many of his most important discoveries and announced them in his book, the Sidereus Nuncius.
From the Sidereus Nuncius, By Galileo Galilei:
“On the seventh day of January in this present year 1610, at the first hour of the night, when I was viewing the heveanly bodies with a telescope, Jupiter presented itself to me. And because I had prepaped a very excellent instrument for myself, I perceived (as I had not done before on account of weakness of my previos instrument) that there were three starlets beside the planet, small indeed, but very bright.”
And with those words began the era of modern observational astronomy…
